Lyndon LaDouche

That's likely to appeal to the brilliant but bored as well as the terminally dumb. But if LYM promised UCI students nothing more than lectures on Einstein and some German-language singing, it'd be nothing more than a bizarre New England prep school. No, what LYM really delivers is meaning on a big scale—the sense that we live in a kind of End Times and that only a few bright, courageous kids stand between fascism and liberty. That's heady shit for a kid bombing out of freshman comp.

But when you read about the process of turning ordinary kids into LaRouchies, you can't help thinking that LaRouche's critics, the ones who say he's running a cult, have got it right. In a press release describing a 2004 LYM meeting in Los Angeles, a LaRouchie reported, "The first panel included a presentation by Leni R. on Friedrich Schiller as a historian and a great writer of truth. As an example, the LYM performed parts of the play Don Carlos. An intense argument developed after some tried to defend today's counterculture, but realized they were acting based on emotions and not thinking."

Keep in mind that you're reading all of this in a paper, which, despite its reputation as a communist rag, is actually—unwittingly—doing the dark work of the Republican Party. I asked Mike Lacey, my boss, what it was like to be part of an organization the LYM calls a "Gestapo," headed by a man like Dick Cheney.

"Frankly, Dick was always a little standoffish prior to the [November] election," Lacey told me. "Sure, he liked the cash stream [from our papers], but for some reason he blames Dan Savage for his daughter's 'issues.' Now, with Mr. Macaca going down to defeat in Virginia, Cheney has changed his tune. He thinks the key to immigration problems might be wider circulation of 'ĦAsk a Mexican!'"